{"id":4861,"date":"2013-09-23T06:01:45","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T06:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=4861"},"modified":"2013-09-23T06:01:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T06:01:45","slug":"journey-to-the-centre-great-middle-lines-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=4861","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Reader<\/em> by Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) is 216 pages long and the middle page (of my edition) is p. 108, where Hanna, a former guard in a Nazi concentration camp, is on trial for her part in locking women prisoners in a church which was then bombed and burnt down.\u00a0 Two pages later, on p. 110, Hanna asks the judge a question which leaves him, and us the readers, on shaky ground.\u00a0 The judge searches for an answer, stalls for time, and eventually answers unsatisfactorily.\u00a0 We the readers read on, hoping a better answer is offered in the second half of the novel.<\/p>\n

Here’s the portion of the conversation that puts the ball in the judge’s court:<\/p>\n

‘Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?’
\n‘Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones.’
\n‘So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?’
\nHanna didn’t understand what the presiding judge was getting at.
\n‘I … I mean … so what would you have done?’ Hanna meant it as a serious question.\u00a0 She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) is 216 pages long and the middle page (of my edition) is p. 108, where Hanna, a former guard in a Nazi concentration camp, is on trial for her part in locking women prisoners in a church which was then bombed and burnt down.\u00a0 Two … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[460,466,2,462,463,21,226,467,3,270],"class_list":["post-4861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-great-middle-lines","tag-20th-century-literature","tag-bernhard-schlink","tag-literature","tag-middle-lines","tag-novels","tag-postaday","tag-postaday2013","tag-the-reader","tag-translation","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}